By Danielle Brune Sigler

Teachers attend a workshop about using Watergate materials in their classroom in 2011. Photo by Pete Smith.

In elementary school, my class took a field trip to the main branch of the Houston Public Library. We learned how to use the microfilm machines, and I was allowed to look up the front page of the newspaper from the day I was born. I still remember the “Ransom Recovered” headline, a reference to the Patty Hearst case, something about which I knew absolutely nothing.

That moment sitting in front of a microfilm reader is as vivid to me now as it was 30 years ago. Suddenly, there was an entire world before me. I had discovered the appeal of research and of primary source materials. I certainly wouldn’t have articulated it that way at the time. I just knew that I had found something new and interesting that suggested limitless possibility.

That love of research ultimately led me to the Ransom Center. And appreciating the value of using primary source materials in the classroom has inspired the Ransom Center’s teacher workshops.

For the last five years, the Center has offered seminars for teachers on topics ranging from the 1920s to Watergate. These workshops provide the Ransom Center with the opportunity to share collections with educators from around the state who can then take their experiences and digital materials back to the classroom and their students. Local teachers can also follow up by bringing their students to tour the exhibitions.

This spring, the Ransom Center will be hosting two workshops related to the exhibition The King James Bible: Its History and Influence. The first workshop will examine the historical influence of the King James translation and is designed for social studies teachers at the junior high and high school levels, while the second workshop will focus on the King James Bible’s literary influence and is designed for language arts teachers at the junior high and high school levels.

A grant from Humanities Texas, the state affiliate of the National Endowment for the Humanities, made these workshops possible. Thanks to their support, teachers will leave the workshop with a copy of Gordon Campbell’s Bible: The Story of the King James Version 1611–2011, an edition of the King James Bible, and digital images from the Center’s collections to use in their classrooms.

By supporting the work of local educators, we hope to foster the next generation of scholars and help students understand how vital the care and preservation of our cultural heritage is.

The web exhibition highlights the immense scope of the Simmons & Co. archive and is intended to encourage research in the collection. The exhibition is organized into 10 categories of costume design and showcases 228 selected images drawn from 60 film and theater productions. The Web exhibition was funded by a grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH).

The Ransom Center acquired the voluminous archive of B. J. Simmons & Co. in two separate installments in 1983 and 1987. Comprising more than 500 boxes, the collection is one of the largest of its kind in the world.

From its founding in 1857 to its demise in 1964, Simmons & Co. created stage costumes for hundreds of theater productions in London, the provinces and overseas, ranging from Victorian pantomime to the “kitchen sink” dramas of the 1960s. Simmons & Co. also provided costumes for more than 100 films, including features directed by Alexander Korda and Laurence Olivier.

By Jennifer Hecker

In the spring of 2009, the Harry Ransom Center received a grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities to catalog the Morris L. Ernst papers. The collection will be closed to researchers until the project is completed in the fall of 2011. During that time, a team of one full-time project archivist and two part-time assistant archivists will arrange, describe, and preserve the Ernst papers. They will also produce a standard finding aid (or guide to the collection), which will be available online.

During the cataloging process, the archivists aim to achieve two goals: access and preservation. The Ernst papers, despite being uncataloged, have been used frequently since their acquisition. Several lists and indexes to the papers exist, but they are incomplete, unreliable, and difficult to navigate. This project will replace those various guides with a standardized, online finding aid, which will be searchable and generally much easier to access and use.

The other goal is to make the physical material last as long as possible, so that the information contained in the papers will remain a part of the cultural record. To this end, project staff will re-house the papers in acid-free boxes and folders. At-risk items—those that have been damaged by water, age, or other environmental factors—will be treated by the Center’s Conservation Department. The Ransom Center has a state-of-the-art lab where materials can be stabilized for long-term preservation.

When the cataloging project is complete, the Ernst papers will be housed with the Center’s other collections in secure temperature- and humidity-controlled stacks, ensuring the papers’ availability to researchers.